The truth, the whole truth and anything but the truth!
Author: drnicko
Awarded an MBE for services to arts-based businesses, I am passionate about generating inspiring, socially engaging, creative practice within educational contexts both nationally and internationally.
Its not Shakespeare’s birthday But the anniversary of his death day. What is there left to say About a writer who made generations sweat with dismay About their innate inability To comprehend the way The people parleyed In those days?
His iambic pentameter His turns of phrase Were well made Worthy of praise. But why would those, lazy in their attention, Who failed to be swayed By his ornate writing display Useful during great state occass-ions, Ask, does he really matter any more?
The doubters do not have much say About his undoubted reputa-tion That much cannot be doubted. Was he gay? Many ask But this is not the question to ask of Mr. Willy the Shake. No, we should use his death day To celebrate his poetray And rhyming capabilities Which put the rest of us to shame.
We’re publishing Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater on 6 May and here’s your chance to review it, completely free!
The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Anything but the Truth
Hardly a day goes by without someone telling us off about our bodies: they’re too big, too small, in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they just don’t behave in the way we want them to.
How we interact with contemporary sport can be a productive way to explore our relationship with our bodies and how they respond to the demands we make of them. We follow performers and athletes, clubs and countries, the ups and downs of the elite; and we are encouraged – daily – to get off our sofas, to join in and be part of some team or another. We identify, and sometimes, over-identify with our sporting heroes. We become appalled at their behaviour when they fall from grace, but can’t help getting drawn into their stories, whatever age we are, and whatever age they are.
The Confessions series of books explores these matters in, hopefully, an entertaining and thought-provoking manner. Whilst a particular sport might be more prominent, the books themselves are not really about that sport at all. Tennis Player explored dreams and delusions; Footballer, loneliness; and Basketball Player was my take on the Covid-19 pandemic.
Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater follows this tradition by exploring the expectations of growing up and adulthood.
Where previous editions of the Confessions series explored the condition of the ageing sports person from one end of the age spectrum (usually a narrator who is looking back at their life), Figure Skater is written from a young person’s point of view. A person in their teenage years who has, for various reasons explored through the story, aged prematurely.
Unlike Peter Pan, the boy who never wanted to grow up, Peter, the narrator of this story, has had to grow up much too soon. Set in Brighton at the turn of the 1960s and early 1970s, we hope Figure Skater will thrill you with its turns, spins and leaps of imagination! If you’d like to be one of the first to review it just leave us your contact details below and we’ll get a copy over to you as fast as we can!
(And please don’t worry if your review is damning with faint, major or non-existent praise! All feedback is helpful, really it is!)
“Let’s face it, you’re never going to get up to 70mph on a trick board,” asserted the old timer down at the aquadrome today when I asked him about how one might go about getting a few water ski-ing lessons, and a bit of a taste of speed out on the water. My dad had tried water ski-ing a few times and somewhere in the piles of photograph of him scattered across the world, there are images of him waving to some anonymous photographer on a boat, on dry land, or even perhaps in the middle of the ocean such was the graininess of the photograph.
But he’s always waving and smiling, one hand on the rope, one hand in the air, teeth gleaming, hair immaculately in place, despite travelling at some speed on one board. I’m not sure whether it was a trick board or not, but he seemed to be having the time of his life. So I’d vowed for some years to get a taste of the high life, or low life, or wet life, or whatever life it was he was experiencing which gave him that joie de vivre and the ability to stand on one board whilst traversing the oceans’ waves at speed.
So to be told I was never going to be able to get up to 70mph on a trick board by someone who I’d never met before, had probably never met my dad before either turned into a call to action which the old timer may well regret one day. I’ll be taking water skiing lessons when the weather gets warmer, my arms get stronger and before the summer is out: and before he knows it, I’ll be back in front of him with the relevant accreditation to demonstrate my target speed on the relevant trick board. This certification will be accompanied by some blog postings which are likely to turn into another book within the ‘Confessions of an Ageing (insert your favourite sports here) Player by the end of the year. He may well regret throwing down that watery gauntlet today.
The Truth, the Whole Truth and Anything but the Truth
One thing for sure though is that the book will have very little to do with water ski-ing.
Hardly a day goes by without someone telling us off about our bodies: they’re too big, too small, in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they just don’t behave in the way we want them to.
How we interact with contemporary sport is a productive way site to explore our relationship with our bodies and we how we they respond to the demands we make of them. We follow performers and athletes, clubs and countries; the ups and downs of the elite; and we are encouraged – daily – to get off our sofas, to join in and be part of some team or another. We identify – and sometimes over- identify – with our sporting heroes. We are appalled at their behaviours when they fall from grace, but can’t help getting drawn into their stories, whatever age we are, and whatever age they are.
The Confessions series of books explores these matters in, hopefully, an entertaining and thought-provoking manner. Whilst a particular sport might be more prominent in the Confessions series, the books themselves are not really about that sport at all. Tennis Playerexplored dreams and delusions; Footballer, loneliness; Basketball Playerwas my take on the Covid-19 pandemic and Figure Skaterfollows this tradition by exploring the expectations around of growing up and adulthood.
I’m not sure what Water Skier will be about yet, but one thing you can pretty certain of is that it won’t be about how to water ski at 70mph on a trick board against the odds at a local aquadrome.
Thanks to the late Joyce Ashton, the people of the village of Barkston in Lincolnshire will be remembered for what they loved about their food.
In a publication compiled by Joyce and subsequently published to raise funds for St. Nicholas Church, you can learn about and try out all sorts of recipes collected from the villagers, not so ancient and not so modern: Pan Haggarty (a new one for me), Elderflower Champagne (an old one for me) and Grantham Gingerbreads , named presumably after the nearest town to the village.
Grantham is of course famous for all sorts of things: Isaac Newton went to The King’s School, it had the first women police officers in the UK, it produced the UK’s first tractor in 1896 and there’s something else it was responsible for which I can’t quite put my finger on at the moment but it may well have been the Grantham Gingerbreads (page 12 of the Barkston Village Recipe Book) which I shall be attempting to rustle up in the not too distant future.
You wonder though as you skim through the recipes how she went about collecting them. Did she put out a call one Sunday morning to the assembled parishioners? Follow that up by door to door visits? This book of ‘retro-recipes’ was printed in 1978 so we can be sure there was no social media activity at the time to help her put out her call.
No Googleing, no Twittering, no FaceBooking, no Instagramming, no Snapchatting, no LinkingIn, no Soundclouding, nothing of those things. And if she had even heard those words in 1978, chances are, unless she was a clairvoyant or an ICT expert who had insight into the impending internet revolution, those terms would have been utterly meaningless to her as they would have been to the rest of us. Some of us might look back to those halcyon social-media-free-zone days of 1978 and wonder whether the social media revolution that’s been transforming (or wrecking, or salvaging – take your pick) our lives since then is all it’s cracked up to be.
No, chances are she would have had to rely on the good old-fashioned form of the call out – the Word of Mouth. Perhaps she also took some inspiration from the Christopher Whall window in St. Nicholas Church, which tells the story of the Annunciation, made by Christopher Whall as a tribute to the memory of Kathleen Elizabeth Clements, wife of the rector for the Church who died on April 18, 1920.
The Annunciation is the moment when the Archangel Gabriel pops down from on high and proclaims to Mary that she is going to give birth to the son of God, some time soon. It’s quite a pronouncement, the mother of all ‘calls to action’ you might think. You also wonder if the Archangel Gabriel had had access to the internet, whether he too would have resorted to tweeting about his proclamation umpteen times (firstly to tell people he was going to make it, secondly to tell them he was doing it and thirdly to tell them he’d done it.)
But putting Archangel Gabriel’s call to action aside for one moment, however Joyce Ashton undertook her labour of food love, she clearly heeded her call to action and proceeded to produce a book that has lasted nearly 30 years, and continues to enlighten us about the food loves and lives of the people of Barkston.
Thanks to Carrie James, Faith Ballaam, John Crozier, Revd. Stuart Hadley, Richard Shireby and Cora Townson for their help making my visit to Barkston and Marston so memorable this morning.
(Thanks Mrs Priestley too, your Chocolate Crunch recipe went down a treat tonight.)
Another April Sunday and another London Marathon is under starters orders and they’re off!
The wheelchair racers are soon out in front, the elite women not far behind them and the elite men not far off their heels either. And lumbering towards the starting line, the giant phalanx of runners of all shapes and sizes gathers itself and sets off too, carrying all their glorious humanity, spectacle and impromptu carnival atmosphere.
The TV soon hones in on the multitude of stories of what motivates these runners: running for mum, running for dad, running for Colin down the road who came home from work one day a bit short of breath but was dead by the weekend, struck down in his prime with some deadly unknown variant of a disease hardly anyone had ever heard of.
The medically motivated stories come thick and fast now that the race is underway and there’s a runner for every potential ailment which afflicts humanity. But what’s common to the runners is their desire, not just to run the race of their lifetime, but to raise funds to direct towards potential cures of, or respite from, those ailments.
Whether this be through funding research, hospices, personal support, clothing, food, respirators, the list is endless, but all attending to addressing various physiological deficiencies which many loved ones near and afar are experiencing.
Breathing, eating, water, shelter, clothing, sleep: the basic human physiological needs as presented on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs provide the inspiration of many of the runners who are working their way through the streets of London this wet Sunday afternoon.
Maslow’s Hierarchy is a motivational theory comprising a five-tier model of human needs, and is often shown as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the physiological needs (Breathing, eating, water, shelter, clothing, sleep), followed by safety, love and at its peak, self-actualization: the latter of which includes the motivation of creativity.
Maslow suggests that the needs lower down in the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to higher needs, for example, breathing comes before dancing, painting or acting and on one level this is hard to dispute.
Walking for the Teenage Cancer Trust, running for MIND, racing for Shelter: the runners of the phalanx are driven, their causes are worthy, attention demanding and brook no argument. Why would you dispute Tony’s need for rare medication? Joan’s need for emotional support? Abraham’s need for safe housing?
They’re no brainers of causes and in times of energy crisis, post covid stress and cost of living meltdowns in which governments can only wring their hands in anxiety or sheer couldn’t-give-a toss-ness, their demand for protection against life threatening conditions is undisputed.
But wait a moment – who else is crossing the line here? Some smart Alec who wants to raise money for drama classes for the youth in his village? And another smarter Alexa who want to improve the painting skills of the tiny tots in her inner-city nursery? They’re all very well, but in these tough every-penny-counts-for-our-physiological-needs-days, the insistent request for arts funding of all things really is taking the proverbial biscuit.
In some minds, the arts are a nice thing to have, a nice want, not an essential need and if you asked Mr. Maslow about what he felt his priorities were, he suggests that the arts aren’t in that baseline of his triangle but are better located at its peak, in the tip of the pyramid that is called ‘self actualisation’ presumably subsumed within creativity.
Placing creativity at the top of his pyramid of needs, Mr Maslow doesn’t do justice to how the arts and creativity play out in our lives. The fact is that creativity isn’t just the preserve of the great and the good, the singers of the Top 40 or the TV celebrities who are out plugging their books and recent films. Creativity is a daily motivational necessity for all of us, not the preserve of the privileged few.
Anna Craft many years ago pointed us to the concept of everyday creativity, the “little-c creativity” which we all draw on to get us through our daily grinds. Craft’s work suggested that creativity – whilst not a physiological phenomenon like breathing, eating and sleeping – is a fundamental need to all our existences: an everyday and lifelong imperative, a problem-finding, problem-solving capability with possibility thinking – the transformation from what is to what might be – at its heart (Robin Alexander, Cambridge Primary Review, 2014)
The conflict that emerges when we try and place the value of creativity against the value of the kidney machine, decent housing or a respirator is misplaced and misses the point that all our creativities need supporting: and that they are as essential to our lives as housing, hygiene and hydration.
Whilst Maslow came up with his model in 1954, my modest proposal is that it’s about time that model was redrawn to reflect creativity as being a base need in his pyramid.
Whilst this may not have a huge impact on the runners and riders of the 2024 London Marathon, it might at least see the arts being acknowledged as being a vital cause to attract further additional investment from a willing public: and could go some way to ameliorating the effects of the next arts funding crisis which will be coming to an arts centre very near you, any time soon.
The influence of Torville and Dean’s Bolero is never far away in our forthcoming publication and you can see why their inspiration has been so exhilarating here:
And for good measure, why not see the original here?
“Prost!” we offer up to our German partners as we English lift our glasses to greet them at the first informal gathering this week of the TMC/Werkhaus collaboration, Common Values, Shared Dreams, funded by Cultural Bridge. There’s some gentle laughter and they offer back, “Zum Wohl!” in return. ‘Prost’ is viewed as a bit of an antiquated term now, reminiscent of perhaps some older, more conservative times.
The laughter intensifies shortly after when we ask about each others’ roles. Our Werkhaus partners hear this as both ‘rolls’, as in tummy rolls of flab bought about by too much beer and cake and also as in ‘brötchen i.e. breakfast rolls you might have at your hotel in the morning. We all recover enough to explain what sounds like ‘rolls’ is actually ‘roles’ and we proceed to introduce ourselves to each other over the course of the evening. And to cap it all, what we understand in the term ‘Werkhaus’ is nothing to do with what it sounds like in English; the ‘workhouse’ of Victorian values in which the poor were packed away in austerity filled mansions in shame and humiliation. No, the ‘werkhaus’ in this case refers to a cultural offer where your artistic work can be developed, shown and valued; a place to show off your life’s work, not be punished and castigated in. In another moment, a colleague apologisies for speaking English with a Dutch accent; and I want to apologise for speaking German with an old, medieval inflection.
Although this took no longer than perhaps 30 minutes of our first visit, we’re reminded rapidly of the power of language and the baggage – if not freight – it carries. We find ourselves reaching for words and terms which come from the depths of our memories and wonder whether they came from; our grandparents perhaps? The media? Old stereotypes? There’s no time to find out in our gathering, but it’s a sharp reminder that sometimes our voices are not our own but echoes of other, more distant voices who have infiltrated our consciousness, almost without us knowing they’ve done it.
We’d do well to remember this in the weeks ahead. Working in a significant cultural education partnership is a big ambition in itself and we’ll need to remember to keep checking our language, checking our meanings and trying to make sure we speak with our own personal voices rather than the recombined voices of people and ages past.
The church has an Early English tower. The Chancel was restored by Charles Kirk in the 1880s. The church is a Grade I listed building. Whall’s two- light window in the South Aisle West celebrates the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s rule. The left hand light shows a mother with two children and the right hand light shows a child sitting on Christ’s lap. Inscription in left hand light reads “Suffer the little children to come unto me” and that in the right hand light reads “For such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” At the foot of the left hand light is a crown and the date 1837, and at the foot of the right hand light is V.R.I. and the date 1897. (List of works by Christopher Whall)
Many moons ago when I was rethinking my Christian roots, I was guided to read a new passage from a prayer-book every time I entered a church. I was a big fan of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction at the time and so one day went into the local church to see if I could find the quote which Samuel L Jackson’s character, Jules, claims was from Ezekiel 25:17:
“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”
I found out soon after that in actual fact, Ezekiel 25:17 doesn’t say this at all. Tarantino had liberally exposed Ezekiel to the Genesis story of Cain and Abel which he then finished it off with an infusion of the spirit of Psalm 23. It was quite a marriage of different texts used to justify vengeance and acts of great violence throughout the film.
Whilst I was disappointed back then to find the text was a figment of a screen writer’s and not a scripture writer’s imagination, I was reminded of Tarantino’s stories a few days after Brexit’s Article 50 trigger had been pulled, and when I visited St Mary’s Church in Marston to view the Christopher Whall window which commemorated the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897.
Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was a lively affair full of exhortations of national pride and future empire building. Chamberlain suggested the Diamond Jubilee should be seen as a “Festival of the British Empire” and communities across the country decorated streets with arches, flags and bunting and the usual Jubilee paraphernalia. Children received Jubilee mugs; elderly women were given tea and elderly men were given tobacco. Clearly they’d not heard of Health and Safety in those days. In Marston, the Christopher Whall window was installed in the west window in the south aisle to commemorate the event.
“The streets, the windows, the roofs of the houses, were one mass of beaming faces, and the cheers never ceased,” Queen Vic wrote in her journal the day after her anniversary (presumably about the street parties, not about the installation of the window). Later that night Victoria sat next to Archduke Franz Ferdinand at a state banquet in Buckingham Palace. His subsequent assassination in 1914 led, as we know, to the start of World War I.
Perhaps had they had the benefit of a Tarantino mixed up biblical script we wouldn’t be sat where we are today. He could have added a recipe to the Barkston Village Recipe Book which instead of calling for vengeance, could have made a powerful call to action for wisdom in times of nationalistic fervour and difficult international relations. He might have fused elements of Chapter IX of the Wisdom of Solomon – the bible reading on the lectern from last week’s service or the preparation for next week’s:
God of my ancestors, merciful Lord, by your word you created everything. By your Wisdom you made us humans to rule all creation, to govern the world with holiness and righteousness, to administer justice with integrity. Give me the Wisdom that sits beside your throne…
with something from Matthew from the New Testament:
I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven…
Unfortunately, as far as I know, Tarantino hasn’t yet visited Marston, but when he does, I’m sure he’ll be given a warm welcome, especially if he can shed some guiding light on the fictions we’re all facing in these Brexit fuelled, anxious times.
“This is a fictional country isn’t it?” “No, it’s real – we just don’t know where it is yet.”
My mum, daughter and I had just arrived in Schwarzenbach to visit the Erika Fuchs Haus, named after my god mother and my mum’s aunt, Erika Fuchs, who used to send me ten Deutsche Marks annually for my birthday which was quite a tidy sum for a youngster back then.
In those days I was completely oblivious to her work and much more inclined to follow The Beano. But I was rapidly brought up to speed some 50 years later when being introduced to the museum by its head, Dr. Alexandra Hentschel, and private collector, Gerhard Severin.
After being introduced to a multimedia history of comic stories and graphic novels in a darkened studio, a side door opens and a bright green gallery of the country of Entenhausen and all the Disney characters greets you in a sunny, shiny green lively reveal which made us all go ‘wow’ in unison.
Gerhard showed us an interactive map of Entenhausen which looked simultaneously plausible and impossible and which prompted my question of whether or not Entenhausen was fictional. His response of “No, it’s real – we just don’t know where it is yet” struck me as the perfect riposte to those of us who struggle with whether stories are fictions, whether fictions are facts, whether facts are fictions, and all those impossible questions about what constitutes real worlds, unreal worlds, truths and falsehoods.
It’s also a great antidote to those who tell you, in these post-Brexit times of ‘There is No Alternative‘ in the UK, that there is a very real, viable and tangible alternative: we just don’t know where it is yet.
As well as enjoying the museum we were also fortunate to encounter the stories of the stained glass windows in the restaurant of our accommodation, the Hotel Strauss in Hof. They provided a comic contrast to Erika’s work, simultaneously conjuring up the work of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana and playing against the religious symbolism of the Whall windows I’ve been visiting across the UK.
Many personal and family stories revealed themselves over the following days and helped place various pieces of the missing family jigsaw into the relevant slots in the bigger picture: whether they are actually truth or fiction is an ongoing question which will require a few more visits to Schwarzenbach and its homage to the work of my mysterious god mother and Great Aunt, Dr. Erika Fuchs neé Petri.
“Christopher Whall completed two windows for St Martin’s Cathedral in Leicester. These were an East window and a West window in the inner South Aisle. The three-light window was installed in 1905 and has St Martin in the central light. The East window, dating to 1920, is a war memorial window. In “The Buildings of England. Leicestershire and Rutland” this window was described thus “In an Expressionist style with many Pre-Raphaelite memories”. The lower left-hand light features St Joan of Arc.” (List of Christopher Whall works in cathedrals and minsters)
